cargo-dist

cargo-dist takes an application and produces a complete, reproducible set of release artifacts for every platform you target: platform-specific archives, checksums, a machine-readable dist-manifest.json, and the installers that fetch them — shell, PowerShell, Homebrew formula and npm wrapper. It plans the whole release up front, so what CI builds is decided before a single compiler runs.

The tool began life as a cargo subcommand and still publishes under the name cargo-dist, but the executable it installs is dist, and it is no longer Rust-only: a generic workspace hands dist any build-command you like, so Go, Zig, C and shell projects get the same artifact matrix, checksums and installers as a Cargo workspace does.

dist init writes the configuration and the release workflow; dist plan shows exactly which artifacts a release would produce (and, with --output-format=json, in a form other tools can consume); dist build runs a local build of them; dist host uploads. Because plan is pure computation it needs no toolchain, no network and no git repository — it is the fast way to answer "what would this release actually ship?".

What's included

• dist — the packaging CLI. dist init to set up or update a project, dist plan to see the artifact matrix, dist build to produce it locally, dist manifest for the build manifest without building, dist linkage to report the dynamic libraries a built artifact pulls in, and dist host to publish.

The mirrored archives also carry upstream's README.md, CHANGELOG.md and both license files (LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE) alongside the binary.

Links

• cargo-dist on GitHub
• The dist book
• Quickstart
• Configuration reference